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Last Thursday the first TTN Enschede Meet-up was held. The Things Network (TTN) is an open infrastructure, using LoRaWan, which lets Internet of Things (IoT) devices communicate data to the cloud, from which it can be approached over regular internet connections.

What fascinates me in this, is that one can implement a city or region wide infrastructure for very little money, where normally the infrastructure is the expensive part. Especially after the TTN Amsterdam initiators ran a kickstarter campaign offering the gateways for just 200 Euro, last October. With several volunteers here in Enschede, we can quickly achieve city wide coverage, and open it up to all comers. And that is what is indeed happening, as it looks like at least 6 gateways will become available in the city soon. One gateway, which Timothy at Innovalor placed on top of the highrise of the University of Applied Sciences Saxion in the city center, is already operational, since last week. The rest will follow in June.

The meeting last Thursday of fifteen TTN and IoT interested people in Enschede was a good first encounter. Besides getting to know eachother, it was good to exchange ideas, experiences, and talk about what we could actually do once the infrastructure is in place.

As it turns out, thinking about use cases is not easy, and that will definitely need more thought and discussion.

Meanwhile one of the participants, JP, showed his LoRaWan device that measures signal strength of the mentioned gateway. On his mobile phone he combines those measurements with his phone’s GPS location. This way he built a signal strength map of the Saxion gateway while cycling around town over the course of his normal activities. The LoRaWan receiver and the map are shown below. As it turns out more people are currently doing this type of wardriving, trying to crowdsource a coverage map of the Netherlands.

Earlier this year a group of Internet of Things enthusiasts in a month or so launched an open communication infrastructure across the entire city of Amsterdam, enabling anyone to let their IoT devices communicate. Without the need for 4G, Wifi or BT connections, it uses LoRaWan, which allows low bandwith but long range traffic, at low energy usage levels. They call it The Things Network.

Currently The Things Network is running a Kickstarter campaign to bring LoRaWan devices into the hands of more people, and thus create IoT infrastructure in more cities. The gateways on offer cost about 20% of what similar devices cost, and this is a great opportunity to implement a solid city wide infrastructure at very low cost. With an old fraternity friend, Ian Kennedy, we are now looking to create such an infrastructure for my hometown Enschede.

Enschede is a town of about 160.000 people, and covering the city will require 3 or 4 gateways, to which nodes and devices can connect to communicate. Both Ian and I ordered a gateway through the Kickstarter campaign, and are now looking to connect to more people locally with an interest in IoT. Ideally one or two others will also fund a gateway, ensuring city wide coverage. The coverage between the two of us is shown in the image at the top, and as you can see especially the southern suburbs still need coverage. We will likely also reach out to companies and the city government to see who else is interested in experimenting with this new infrastructure. As delivery of the devices is scheduled for late spring next year, still a long time away, we have plenty of time to get the ball rolling before that.

Interested in making Enschede IoT ready? Join the newly created mailing list Things Enschede (running on my own mail server), and/or help create the infrastructure by adding hardware through the TheThingsNetwork Kickstarter campaign. We will aim to organize a meet-up in November to get local conversations going.

If there are a few others willing to join us, we will certainly add Enschede to the growing list of cities in the The Things Network community. UPDATE: Others are indeed also active, and have been arranging gateways too. That ensures we will have enough hardware to get city wide coverage up and running. Meanwhile a local Enschede community page has been opened, but not yet filled.

At the Open Government Data Camp in Warsaw on 20 and 21 October I hosted a workshop on ‘making open government data work for local government’.

If open government data is here to stay then only because it has become an instrument to government bodies themselves, and not because government are releasing data only because of compliance with transparency and re-use demands from others (central government or citizens).

This workshop started from the premise that there is opportunity in local governments treating open data as a policy instrument to find new solutions to the issues local communities face, amongst others in coming up with new ways of working in light of budget cuts.

Contributions were made by the local open government data initiatives of the cities of Berlin, Munich (Germany), Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Enschede (Netherlands), Linz and Vienna (Austria), who all shortly presented the current status of their initiatives. It was great to be able to have seven cities take the stage after each other to explain their work in and with local government on open data, and it shows how much things have changed in the past year alone.

Slides of the introductory presentation I gave are available, and are embedded below.

At the Open Government Data Camp in Warsaw on 20 and 21 October I hosted a workshop on ‘making open government data work for local government’.

If open government data is here to stay then only because it has become an instrument to government bodies themselves, and not because government are releasing data only because of compliance with transparency and re-use demands from others (central government or citizens).

This workshop started from the premise that there is opportunity in local governments treating open data as a policy instrument to find new solutions to the issues local communities face, amongst others in coming up with new ways of working in light of budget cuts.

Contributions were made by the local open government data initiatives of the cities of Berlin, Munich (Germany), Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Enschede (Netherlands), Linz and Vienna (Austria), who all shortly presented the current status of their initiatives. It was great to be able to have seven cities take the stage after each other to explain their work in and with local government on open data, and it shows how much things have changed in the past year alone.
Slides of the introductory presentation I gave are available, and are embedded below.

The city of Enschede declared itself ‘Open Data City’ Monday night by adopting a motion in the City Council.
The motion was the result of cooperation between civil servants, at the information management department and the city council’s administrative staff, as well as me and other citizens in Enschede.Early beginnings: Open Innovation Festival
It basically started a year ago when I got in touch with a few people at city hall to discuss the Open Innovation Festival, that was going to take place in June 2010. I offered to do a session on Open Data, and Patrick Reijnders and Peter Breukers of the city’s IM department and I teamed up to put the session together. Next to the session Patrick with some of his colleagues created an app that combined Twitter, Foursquare and geodata about the various venues in the festival, making it possible to see the discussion on Twitter for the entire festival as well as per venue, and see who was present in the session. The geodata needed (addresses with zipcodes and XY coordinates, was released to the public on that occasion)
At the end of the week Patrick and I put together an open data manifesto and presented that to an Alderman. Around that time I also translated the Vancouver Open Data Motion adopted in 2009 into Dutch and put it up on a wiki for further improvement.

Awareness Raising
In the following months we kept working on raising awareness for open government data. I gave a presentation in August to all of Patricks colleagues involved with IM, application management etc, as part of their yearly get together which Patrick was in charge of organizing this time.
In November a new, smaller, edition of the Open Innovation Festival took place, and I again did a presentation on Open Government Data. There I challenged the city government: I would give them 11 days of my time in 2011 to help them ‘do’ open government data, and I wanted to be paid in the public release of datasets.

Hackday
In December, we, being Patrick, Lars Fehse (also with the city IM dept), Heinze Havinga (recently graduated student, now entrepreneur) and me put together the Enschede edition of the Global Hackday, which brought together some 20 coders and civil servants, including a city council member for a day of hacking. Patrick arranged the release of 25 datasets, by going around city hall asking his colleagues for data. Two prototypes were built on that data during the hackday. For the event we also launched the website http://opendataenschede.nl/

Connecting
After the hackday, which made more people visible to each other around open data, we started to organize the ‘Enschede Data Drinks‘ (modeled after Alper Çugun’s Dutch Data Drinks), to informally bring together interested people.
The IM department was meanwhile looking into writing a project plan on how to release ‘easy data’ quickly and plan for making open data part of the regular processes over time. That is still ongoing. Others in the IM department, triggered by the awareness raising actions, made a little internal platform that would more easily allow the publication of data out of the back-office systems of the city.

Then…the Motion
In January we got a call from the administrative staff of the City Council. On the basis of my earlier translation of the Vancouver motion they were preparing an Open Data Motion. André de Rosa-Spierings and Jeroen Heuvel of the city council staff made sure the motion fitted the coalition agreement, current city gov goals etc, and building political supprt. The city council member that was at the Hackday in December, Erwin Ilgun, and his colleague Eelco Eerenberg from the ICT commission got behind it very quickly. We, (me, Patrick and others from the IM department) helped with the final wording, making sure it was technically correct and feasible, as well as connected to internal work already taking place.
The mentioned Council members were our hosts on March 7th when Patrick and I again did our presentations, this time for interested members of the city council, to explain the why, what and how of open data, as well as the things the IM department was already doing.
After that session, over the course of a week, all of the 9 parties represented in the city council became co-signatories to the motion putting it on the agenda. (Updated this sentence, I said 7 of 9 earlier)
Yesterday, on March 14th the motion was put on the agenda at the start of the meeting by Council member Erwin Ilgun, and it came up for debate and vote at the end of the meeting, near midnight, when I was the only one left on the public balcony to witness it. After Erwin Ilgun explained the motion, one party explained their opposition to the motion, other parties declared their support, and then it came up for a vote: 34 in favor, 3 against (those against cited privacy concerns when combining data sets).

The real work starts now
Now we have to get to work and make sure open data brings benefit to our city. I am very, very, pleased that my own hometown adopted this motion. Also because over the course of the past year I got to know and work with a whole range of people new to me, all passionate about their work. Normally my work takes me away from Enschede, this time I will be seeing the impact of my work right at home, and enjoy that impact with those who work in and care about this city.
The eleven days I gave the city government will go a long way in helping create that impact. Looking forward to it!
This is a (quick and dirty) English translation I made of the motion:

It took over two years, but this week a FabLab opened right in my own home town, to both my and Elmine’s considerable joy.
FabLab Enschede has been a long time in the making, with the lead of the project changing hands several times (also between different institutions), but with the consistent and persistent support of civil servant(s) of the city, guiding the project through the various administrative hoops to secure funding. I wasn’t involved directly but on behalf of the FabLab Foundation added our experience with starting other labs, and helped the plan evolve.
In the end, the FabLab has ended up under the umbrella of Saxion Hogescholen (the local university for applied sciences), and has a focus on smart materials and textiles. It is housed directly adjacent to Saxion’s materials lab and product testing lab.
The formal opening was a great and festive event, with a lot of interest from the business community, and also a lot of people showed up who were eager to start making things. That however is not quite possible yet. Machines are still to be delivered (for the opening they borrowed some machines from elsewhere), and there is also still a job opening for the FabLab’s coordinator. So I am curious to see when it really opens, and how quickly it will gain traction in the local community here.
For now I am just extremely pleased that I as a board member of the FabLab Foundation BeNeLux could sign the license for FabLab Enschede, and that there is now a FabLab in my own city.

Last Saturday, December 4th, the international Open Data Day took place in conjunction with Random Hacks of Kindness. In 73 cities around the globe groups of people came together to work on open data. In the Netherlands activities took place in Amsterdam and my home town Enschede.Open Data Enschede

How it came about
In the last days of October David Eaves (open data advocate from Vancouver) first gave voice to the idea of doing local open data events around the world on a single day. Others quickly picked this up. Mid November the Open Government Data Camp in London, hosted by the Open Knowledge Foundation, brought together people from 30 countries, and that was a good opportunity to increase momentum for the international open data hackathon, as we all got to meet face to face. A little over two weeks ago a few civil servants from Enschede, a student and me met up to discuss if we could take part. We had originally met during the Open Innovation Festival in Enschede in June this year, and were looking for a way to take the next step for open data in our city. Previously we boldly had announced a local open data event, but then over the summer organizing it stalled. We agreed that this international open data day might be the trigger we needed to actually do it. Over lunch we settled on a location: the one we were having lunch at, a meeting lounge in the city center with wifi. That afternoon we also brought a website, Open Data Enschede, online announcing our plans. Two of the civil servants involved, Patrick Reijnders and Peter Breukers started asking their colleagues inside city hall for data sets that could be released.Visualization of cities tweeting about #odhd

Open Data Day
A few days before the event we knew that the work of Patrick and Peter paid off, and that we would have about 25 data sets to work with. The data covered amongst others neighborhood statistics, street names, house numbers, but also the sewage system, geographic height lines, and the location of bus stops and bus routes. We didn’t know how many people would be coming though. As it turned out we had 9 people there for the entire day, entrepreneurs, students, civil servants and an IT-savvy member of the city council, all with coding skills. We were joined for part of the day by about another 10 people. Some of them civil servants involved with information management and geo-information in the city, others from the ITC (international cartography university), as well as the head of the statistics department from the neighboring city Hengelo. This meant lively conversations throughout the day, along with real work being done with the data.
We ended the day with video sessions with the Open Data Day groups in Helsinki (video) and Vienna, talking about the outcomes.
The video session seen from both ends, in Helsinki on the left (photo Irmeli Aro), in Enschede on the right (photo Patrick Reijnders)

Results
For Enschede the Open Data Day was a great success for two main reasons. First of all it meant that a first wave of data sets now has become available. Second, and more important, we have brought together almost 20 people interested in open data, who weren’t aware of each other before (see photos). This is a significant step in creating more momentum in Enschede. A next, more informal, meeting will take place in January 2011 to explore what ideas exist for open data in Enschede, and how to make them reality. The Dutch Data Drinks that Alper started to bring together open data enthusiasts in the Netherlands will get a local chapter, Enschede Data Drinks.
But, of course, like in other participating cities, we also built a few things on Saturday, both currently not more than alpha / demo material though. One is a map of all building permits in the city, with the possibility of accessing the underlying drawings of the building plans, which reuses the building permits data as it is available on the Enschede municipal website. This was build by Robin Janse and Maarten Brouwers, of the Bean Machine.
The other demo maps out companies that went bankrupt for any given post code in the Netherlands, by getting the data from the API of openkvk.nl which in turn re-uses the Dutch trade register. This demo was build by Roy van der Veen.Photo by Patrick Reijnders, Open Data Hackers at Work

I certainly came away from the day with a lot of energy, and am optimistic about moving open data forward in our city. To help stimulate that I offered the city 11 days of my time in 2011, to work with them on open data and figuring out ways how open data can be of benefit to local government as well. In exchange I don’t want money, but the release of data sets to the public. Let’s see if the city takes me up on my offer!

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Blog Interdependent Thoughts maintained since 2002 by Ton Zijlstra. European citizen in a networked world. Based in the Netherlands, living in Europe, working globally. There are no Others. There is just me and many of you.

I write about how our digital and networked world changes how we work, learn, decide and organize. I explore the tools and strategies that help us navigate the networked world.
I am passionate about increasing people's ability to act (knowledge), and their ability to change (learning). Key-words: open data, open government, fablabs, making, complexity, networked agency, networked learning, ethics by design.